TERMS OF use.

Welcome to Mindful Smart Cities.

These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of the Mindful Smart Cities website, publications, digital content, software platform, paid tools, reports, frameworks, advisory materials, and related services.

By accessing or using this website or platform, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the site or services.

Mindful Smart Cities is an independent publishing and software platform operated by Dr Shima Beigi, based in Brussels, Belgium.

Mindful Smart Cities publishes original writing, frameworks, digital tools, urban intelligence resources, and AI-assisted assessment products related to cities, technology, governance, resilience, consciousness, and civic transformation.

For questions about these Terms, you can contact:

Dr Shima Beigi
Email: contact@mindfulsmartcities.com

Please include “terms” in the subject line so your message can be handled appropriately.

Mindful Smart Cities may provide:

• editorial essays, books, articles, newsletters, and research-based publications;
• digital frameworks and conceptual tools;
• paid reports and AI-assisted urban-readiness assessments;
• software-based tools, dashboards, or SaaS features;
• advisory materials for cities, institutions, and organisations;
• educational resources, courses, workshops, or digital products.

Some parts of the site may be freely accessible. Other parts may require payment, account registration, or a subscription.

All content, concepts, frameworks, texts, designs, names, structures, diagrams, methodologies, reports, software flows, visual language, platform architecture, and original materials published on Mindful Smart Cities are owned by Dr Shima Beigi, unless clearly stated otherwise.

This includes, without limitation:

• the Mindful Smart Cities framework;
• the Mindful Kiosk;
• the urban-readiness assessment structure;
• all written content and editorial material;
• all original terminology, classifications, and conceptual models;
• all platform copy, report templates, prompts, and generated report formats;
• all visual, structural, and interface design choices created for the platform;
• all downloadable or paid digital products.

These materials are protected by copyright, intellectual property law, and applicable international protections.

Nothing on this website or platform transfers ownership of any intellectual property to you.

You may use Mindful Smart Cities for your own personal, professional, educational, or internal organisational purposes.

You may:

• read and share public links to published pages;
• quote short excerpts with proper attribution;
• use purchased reports for your own internal reflection, planning, or organisational discussion;
• reference Mindful Smart Cities in academic, civic, or professional contexts with clear attribution.

Attribution should include:

Mindful Smart Cities, by Dr Shima Beigi

Where relevant, please also include a link to the original page.

You may not, without prior written permission:

• copy, reproduce, republish, or redistribute substantial parts of the content;
• sell, license, or commercially exploit any Mindful Smart Cities material;
• claim the frameworks, methods, language, designs, or reports as your own;
• use the content to build a competing product, platform, course, assessment tool, or consultancy framework;
• scrape, crawl, mine, or extract content, data, prompts, reports, or platform structure;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to reconstruct the software, prompts, logic, or assessment methodology;
• use the platform to train, fine-tune, benchmark, or develop artificial intelligence systems without written permission;
• remove copyright notices, authorship references, or attribution;
• use the platform in a way that harms, disrupts, overloads, or compromises the service.

The platform is designed for thoughtful use. It is not a source for automated extraction, imitation, or unauthorised commercial replication.

Some features may require you to create an account.

You are responsible for:

• providing accurate account information;
• keeping your login details secure;
• all activity that occurs under your account;
• notifying us if you believe your account has been compromised.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, misuse the platform, or attempt to access restricted areas without permission.

Mindful Smart Cities may offer paid services, including one-time purchases, subscriptions, reports, advisory products, or digital access plans.

Prices will be displayed before purchase.

Payments are handled by third-party payment providers such as Stripe. We do not store your full payment card details.

When you purchase a digital product, report, subscription, or platform access, you agree to pay the applicable price and any taxes or fees shown at checkout.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you may have a legal right to withdraw from certain online purchases within 14 days.

However, for digital content or digital services, this right may be affected once access begins, once a report is generated, or once the service has been fully performed with your consent.

For paid digital reports, AI-assisted assessments, downloadable materials, or immediate-access digital products, we may ask you at checkout to confirm that you want immediate access and acknowledge that your withdrawal right may be limited once the service begins or the content is delivered.

Unless otherwise stated at checkout:

• one-time digital reports are non-refundable once generated or delivered;
• subscription fees are non-refundable for billing periods already started;
• you may cancel future subscription renewals according to the cancellation options provided;
• mistaken duplicate payments may be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

Some Mindful Smart Cities tools may use artificial intelligence to generate reports, reflections, recommendations, or structured outputs based on information you provide.

AI-assisted outputs are provided for informational, educational, strategic, and reflective purposes only.

They are not legal, financial, engineering, architectural, urban planning, procurement, medical, psychological, or governmental advice.

You remain responsible for evaluating any output before relying on it. Institutions, cities, and organisations should seek qualified professional advice before making decisions based on any report or platform output.

We do not guarantee that AI-assisted outputs will be complete, accurate, current, suitable for your specific situation, or free from error.

Mindful Smart Cities may provide frameworks and materials relevant to governance, urban transformation, AI, resilience, and civic systems.

These materials are designed to support thinking, orientation, and strategic reflection. They do not replace professional legal, regulatory, technical, procurement, planning, or policy advice.

Any use of Mindful Smart Cities materials in institutional, municipal, governmental, commercial, or public decision-making contexts is your responsibility.

If you submit text, data, city descriptions, organisational information, or other material through the platform, you confirm that you have the right to provide that material.

You retain ownership of your own submitted content.

You grant Mindful Smart Cities a limited right to process your submitted content only as needed to provide the service, generate reports, maintain platform functionality, ensure security, and comply with legal obligations.

You must not submit unlawful, confidential, sensitive, or third-party material unless you have the right to do so.

Your use of the platform is also governed by our Privacy Notice.

The Privacy Notice explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, which service providers we use, how long we keep data, and what rights you have under the GDPR.

Please read the Privacy Notice carefully before using the platform.

Mindful Smart Cities may rely on third-party service providers for hosting, authentication, payments, email delivery, database infrastructure, analytics, or AI processing.

These providers may include services such as Supabase, Stripe, Resend, Anthropic, Vercel, or similar infrastructure providers.

We are not responsible for third-party services outside our control, but we aim to work with providers that support reliable, secure, and GDPR-conscious operations.

We aim to keep Mindful Smart Cities available and functioning well, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access.

The site or platform may be unavailable from time to time due to maintenance, updates, technical issues, provider outages, security incidents, or changes to the service.

We may modify, suspend, or discontinue parts of the platform at any time.

Where changes materially affect paid users, we will make reasonable efforts to provide notice.

Mindful Smart Cities does not guarantee that use of the platform, reports, frameworks, or advisory materials will produce any specific outcome.

We do not guarantee:

• policy adoption;
• funding success;
• institutional approval;
• business growth;
• regulatory compliance;
• urban transformation outcomes;
• technical implementation results;
• civic participation results.

The platform supports reflection, strategy, and design. It does not control external decisions, institutions, or future events.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Mindful Smart Cities and Dr Shima Beigi shall not be liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of the website, platform, reports, or services.

This includes loss of profits, loss of data, loss of opportunity, reputational harm, institutional decisions, or reliance on AI-assisted outputs.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability where it cannot legally be excluded under Belgian or EU law.

You agree not to misuse the platform or violate these Terms.

If your unlawful use, unauthorised copying, misuse of content, infringement of rights, or breach of these Terms causes harm, claims, losses, or expenses, you may be responsible for them to the extent permitted by law.

If you believe that any material on Mindful Smart Cities infringes your rights, please contact us at:

contact@mindfulsmartcities.com

Please include:

• your name and contact details;
• a description of the material;
• the location of the material on the site;
• the rights you believe are affected;
• any supporting evidence.

If we discover that Mindful Smart Cities content, frameworks, reports, or designs have been copied or commercially reused without permission, we reserve the right to take appropriate action.

The site may include links to third-party websites or resources.

These links are provided for reference or convenience. We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, terms, accuracy, or availability of third-party sites.

We may update these Terms from time to time.

If we make material changes, we will update the effective date and, where appropriate, notify account holders or subscribers.

Your continued use of the site or platform after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Belgium, unless mandatory consumer protection laws in your country of residence provide otherwise.

Where legally permitted, disputes shall be handled by the competent courts of Brussels, Belgium.

For questions about these Terms, permissions, licensing, copyright, or platform use, contact:

Dr Shima Beigi
Email: contact@mindfulsmartcities.com

Please include “terms” or “copyright” in the subject line.